“O Mother, extinguish my brilliance in thy devouring night. Let not my brilliance stain the sublimity of thy perfection. Let not my little light blind me so that I cannot see Thee. Thy love is the velvet sheath to my sword, & the white-hot heat that tempers it. Take me for the sword in thine own hand, with which Thou art girt, O warrior-lover.”

CARD NAME: “Lovers” is the title of the Second Grade of the Order per Liber Legis, equivalent to Adept. It comes from the Indo-European root leubh-, “to care, desire, love.” Important derivatives include belief, love, libido.

ESOTERIC MEANING: The Consciousness of Sensation (or Consciousness of Disposition). It provides faith to the Compassionate (i.e., the Adepts), and clothes them with the Holy Spirit. Within the Supernals, it is called the Foundation of Beauty.

TREE of LIFE: Tifereth to Biynah. (Links ‘Beauty’ and ‘Understanding’; or the Ego-center with Intuition, Ruach with N'shamah, Vav with Heh. The wedding of ‘the Son’ with ‘the Mother.’ The Ordeal of the Abyss. Confrontation of duality and multiplicity. The Mystery of Knowledge.)

ESOTERIC TITLE: The Children of the Voice, the Oracle of the Mighty Gods

TANTRIC & ALCHEMICAL SIGNIFICANCE: The Wedding. Declaration of the Work to be done, employing a complex alchemical symbolism. Solve.

"To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue." -Magick Without Tears

This is the holy sacrament of marriage, that one who are two can realize themselves as one again. Practically, this is about owning your projections and how karma operates--drawing toward us magnetically any truth denied. It is the real life experience of the way light is absorbed and reflected. We see everything we refuse to admit about ourselves on the outside. We need to marry that reality. This is the secret of the twins. Of fraternal relationships. "As brother fight ye." Be thou wedded each experience, each other thing. From the perspective of infinity, they are united anyway. This is Tantra and all the unifying Yogic practices. This is also the explanation for all turbulent relationships. The things in the other that we need to be complete. This is what draws us to the other, the image of what we need nestled within them.

"But all we say and do, however casually, adds up to more, far more, than our most strenuous Operations. 'Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.'" - Commentaries of AL